


Someone, One Day

by Doyle



Category: Sarah Jane Adventures
Genre: F/F, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-14
Updated: 2008-10-14
Packaged: 2018-01-07 01:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1114146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Doyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Is it difficult, writing about love letters when you’ve never written one yourself?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone, One Day

**Author's Note:**

> For [](http://ellisbelle.livejournal.com/profile)[**ellisbelle**](http://ellisbelle.livejournal.com/) for the [](http://dw-femslash.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://dw-femslash.livejournal.com/)**dw_femslash** ficathon – the request was for something to do with writing. Note that this fic is set about 8 years after season 1 of The Sarah Jane Adventures, so Maria’s in her 20s.

Sarah Jane’s kitchen table had been eaten by newspapers. Maria hadn’t noticed them that morning, but she hadn’t been in a state to notice much of anything; around midnight, an hour or so after her neighbours had started the karaoke in earnest, she had managed to pack up her notes, buy a train ticket and travel four hundred miles without at any point consulting her sleeping brain. By now, with six hours exhausted sleep and a long shower behind her, she was at least awake enough to clear a space before she set down her lunch. That meant she was awake enough, too, to feel guilty about having let herself into someone else’s house at six in the morning.

“Sorry for just landing in on you,” she started.

“Don’t be silly.” Sarah Jane caught a paper that was slipping from the top of its pile. “You’ve been sounding less and less coherent on the phone. If you hadn’t turned up by lunchtime K9 and I were driving to Edinburgh to kidnap you.”

“It was the freshers next door. They’re a bit loud. I suppose I could have gone and sat in the cafe or something, but...” But she’d been sitting at her desk with a thumping headache thinking _I want to go home_ , and after that she’d been sitting on a bench in the station, and then she’d been turning the corner onto Bannerman Road.

Sarah Jane said, “Before I had my own house, whenever I had something important to write I used to drag my typewriter all over the place. Sleep on people’s floors, write on railway station platforms. I think it helps.” She closed her hands around her coffee mug and said, casually, “Of course, what helps even more is actually _writing_. But I’m sure you’ve got lots done and plenty of time left.”

She had promised when Maria had started her Master’s that she wouldn’t ever say a word about deadlines or word counts. Right now, keeping her promise was obviously killing her. Maria toyed with her soup in silence for a few seconds before she looked up at Sarah Jane’s pained expression and relented, grinning. “It’s not due till five o’clock on Friday and I’ve started, I promise, ages ago. I’ve got the second draft in my bag, actually.”

“Thank goodness. I was on the verge of a horrible flashback to Rani’s A-Level coursework.”

“Anyway,” Maria said, determined not to think about theses or deadlines or redrafting until she’d finished her lunch, “what’s been happening here?”

“The world’s not likely to end before Friday, if that’s what you mean,” Sarah Jane said, “at least, no more likely than usual. It’s been quiet. A journalist from the _Echo_ ’s been snooping around the place, writing columns about lights in the sky and strange sightings around Bannerman road – hence the newspapers, I haven’t suddenly started hoarding them.”

“I did wonder.”

“Rani’s looking into it. She sounded worryingly enthusiastic on the phone. I’m trying to convince myself she didn’t mean ‘sort him out’ in some kind of horse’s head in the bed way. The boys…”

“What?” Pauses, when used in relation to people with Luke and Clyde’s capacity for getting into trouble, could be ominous things.

“Oh, nothing.” She smiled. “Just a bad habit I’m trying to break. Calling the four of you boys and girls instead of men and women. I hated that when I was your age.”

“I can’t make myself _not_ think of Clyde and Luke as ‘the boys’.”

“No, nor can I.” She rested her chin on her hand, considering. “It’s easier with you, a little bit. You went away and came back older. It’s the incremental change that takes you by surprise.”

Maria tried to think what had changed when she had come back that first time, after a year in America. The boys had been taller, and Luke had spoken and smiled more naturally – Sarah Jane had looked exactly the same, and Maria had forgotten in a second all the very sensible things she’d spent a year telling herself, about teenage crushes and confusing friendship-love for the other sort and the silliness of wishing for things that couldn’t ever, ever happen.

“Clyde and Luke will be sorry they missed you,” Sarah Jane was saying. “Mickey’s dragged them off to the Forest of Dean to meet up with some of Jack Harkness’s bunch. They’re hunting dinosaurs that escaped through some sort of time rift. Allegedly. A suspicious person might look at the portable barbeque and the football nets Clyde was stuffing into the car and assume the whole thing was a flimsy excuse for a few days on an all-Torchwood holiday.”

“Good thing you’re not a suspicious person,” Maria said, and Sarah Jane laughed.

***

The desk in Luke’s old room was lower than her own in at home, and a long session going over transcripts she’d already read a thousand times left her hunched up and hungry. She folded her arms behind her head and stretched backwards, wincing at the tug on her muscles. Who said history wasn’t physically draining, she thought – oh, yes, Clyde.

It was almost midnight. Maria closed her eyes for a minute, enjoying listening to the clock on the wall ticking and K9 trundling around up in the attic. Those noises were familiar and comfortable and, more importantly, weren’t her Edinburgh neighbours massacring rubbish ten year old pop songs.

She padded downstairs in her socks and popped her head around the living room door. “I was going to make tea, if you want... oh.”

Sarah Jane set the sheaf of papers down on the coffee table with a guilty smile. “You did say you had a copy in your bag. I couldn’t resist. Sorry. Look,” she waved a red biro in the air, “I had all good intentions of fixing your spelling, but then I got caught up in just reading it.”

Maria sat down stiffly on the free end of the sofa, hands clasped in her lap. This is silly, she thought. I wanted her to read it. When it was finished, though, not a draft with stupid spelling mistakes and bits left out. “It’s just that nobody except my supervisor’s really read it yet,” she said.

“I know. It’s awful, isn’t it, the first time you let someone else read something important to you? Like being asked to take all your clothes off and let them have a really good stare under a fluorescent light. Only worse.”

“No-o,” Maria said carefully, picturing this in more detail than she would have liked, “I think the clothes thing would be worse.” And even worse than that was asking the question, but she had to: “So what did you... think...?”

“Oh, Maria, it’s a beautiful piece of work,” Sarah Jane said at once, her face lighting up as much as it had that morning, when she’d managed to look as if being woken up at an obscene hour by a bedraggled history student was the loveliest thing in the world. “There’s enough of you in it to be personal without it overwhelming the women you’re writing about. You let them speak for themselves when it’s important; I love the way you’ve set the extracts of the letters against each other. And they’re such magnificent women. I wish I could have known them.”

Maria curled onto the sofa and tried not to look too much like she was glowing. “I thought maybe you did meet one of them,” she said. “Lady Eddington – she’s the one writing to her friend from school – I found a letter from much later in her life where she talks about this man she just calls the Doctor. I’m not sure he’s the real one but,” she shrugged, “I liked thinking it was him.”

“So do I,” Sarah Jane said softly, smiling to herself.

 _Why do you want to study history?_ she’d been asked at her interview, and she’d repeated the things she’d practised with her careers teacher. She hadn’t said _I’ve been in love an ex-time traveller since I was fourteen years old, and all my life I’m going to be looking for places where she’s stepped, bits and pieces of herself she left behind._

“I must have transcribed thousands of letters. Some of these women wrote to their friends – girlfriends, I suppose, but most of the ones I was studying wouldn’t have even thought of it that way, even when they’re going on about dying from not being able to kiss them – every day of their lives. More than once a day, sometimes.”

“I don’t think I’ve read many love letters between women. Only Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. I remember thinking at the time how dreadful it must be to send love letters to a writer. You’re setting your heart at their feet and all they’re thinking is that you’re far too fond of split infinitives.”

Maria eyed the red biro.

“It’s a world away from emails,” Sarah Jane went on, oblivious. “Not knowing if the other person’s got the letter, days or weeks for a reply, the possibility of anyone getting their hands on it.”

“But lasting forever,” Maria said. “For hundreds of years, anyway. And then people coming along and reading what you wrote, years ago, and knowing that you were alive and in love. Even if nobody knew in your lifetime. Even if she never really knew.”

Sarah Jane dropped her head back against the sofa and just looked fondly at her, a long enough glance in silence that Maria shifted in place, blushing. “I can’t imagine you’ve ever so much as bought a stamp in your life,” she said. “You’re that generation. Is it difficult, writing about love letters when you’ve never written one yourself?”

She’d written plenty of them. They’d given her nightmares where she hadn’t torn them up well enough, or they’d found their way into the post box anyway.

“I can imagine what it’s like,” she said.

***

“You must be over the moon.”

Maria stepped to the side of the corridor, smiling an apology at the students squeezing past her. “Mum, I’ve only handed it in, it still needs to be marked.”

That part was a formality, as far as her mother was concerned. “You’ll be brilliant. And we’ll all be there for your graduation, me and your dad and Ivan – and I suppose you’ll want Sarah Anne there as well...”

“If she wants to come.”

“Course she will,” her mother said, as Maria absently checked her pocket for the letter. It was one she’d been writing, depending on how you looked at it, for the past eight hours or the past eight years. “You should feel proud of yourself, sweetheart. That could be the most important thing you ever write.”

“I know,” Maria said, “I think it might be,” and she pushed open the department door and stepped out into the sunshine.


End file.
